"I was talking to our lepers and telling them that leprosy is a gift from God, that God can trust them so much that he gives them this terrible suffering. And one man, who was completely disfigured, started pulling at my sari. ‘Repeat that,’ he said ‘repeat that this is God's love. Those who are suffering understand you when you talk like this, Mother Teresa.’”

Life

“[Rearden] was looking at [Dagny] as at a stranger, he was barely aware that she was a woman, but the sight was flowing into a feeling the words for which were: This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city—they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose—the rising steps of steel and the steps of a being intent upon his goal—this is what they had been, all the men who had lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors—they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue—so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could he give up the world to those others?—so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns?” (AS)

http://atlasshrugged.com/

"A short in a pair of waterlogged track cables in Queens on Monday [August 24] led to the near-total shutdown of the Long Island Rail Road and hours of waiting for thousands of stranded commuters . . .

"[S]oaked by rain from the night before, two or more cables shorted out around 11 a.m., the authorities said, sending a pulse of electricity into a nearby train control tower and setting fire to the century-old equipment inside. It seems improbable that a piece of ancient machinery, a contraption of levers and pulleys designed in *1913*, would be critical to the successful operation of one of the nation’s largest commuter railroads." [NYT, 8/24/10, emph added]

Fiction:

"On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart." [Atlas Shrugged]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/nyregion/24lirr.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=fire%20halts%20long%20island&st=cse

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

None the less, this is a nice collection of brief tributes to the individuals who invented some of our most enjoyable treats -- e.g., the Tootsie Roll, Cracker Jacks, popsicles. I particularly like how James Dewar invented Twinkies, and the quote from the inventor of bubble gum: "I've made kids happy around the world."

Unfortunately, the story omits a significant political-moral point: that such entrepreneurial spirit was driven by a selfish desire to achieve, and that this flourishing was made possible by a (relatively) free market.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/weekinreview/08manny.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=let%20us%20now%20praise&st=cse

However, when this nonsense is expressed by force-wielders such as the F.C.C. chairman, then businessmen are compelled to obey the dictates of such "sharing." They are coerced into the same position as Hank Rearden during his trial over a deal with Ken Danagger: "Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun." (Rearden in Atlas Shrugged.)

The concrete issue here concerns an agreement between Google and Verizon in which Google would get better service if it paid for it.

If that is morally wrong, and demands punishment by the government, then so does giving better placement in a magazine to advertisers who pay more, giving passengers more room and better food in first class -- and restaurants should certainly be banned from serving better food and wine to those customers who willingly pay for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/technology/internet/06fcc.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=f.c.c%20chief%20opposes&st=cse

"Mothers, teachers, doctors, and church members are meeting their dealers in barns and on back doorsteps, paying cash for an illicit substance they say they just can’t live without: raw milk.

"Yes, that’s right, milk – unpasteurized, nonhomogenized, raw milk. It’s illegal to sell for human consumption in North Carolina and 24 other states.

"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says drinking it is like 'playing Russian roulette' and the state epidemiologist compares it to 'heroin' and 'mercury' . . ."

(Incidentally, there is a hilarious episode of the BBC show "Chef!" that satirizes the food Nazis. ["You mean you do cheese running?"] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOCak7wh1U

The evil notion that adults are metaphysically incapable of deciding what's in their best interest comes straight out of Plato. See in particular his "ship of state" metaphor. "[U]ntil philosophers [i.e., philosopher kings] hold power, neither states nor invididuals will have rest from trouble, and the commonwealth we have imagined [a totalitarian state] will never be realized." (Republic, Book V, Part XII)

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=6688

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/nyregion/31mosque.html?_r=1&ref=religion_and_belief

The latest is a radical plan to "make enormous cuts in the public sector" by "putting power in the hands of patients and clinicians . . ." To achieve this, the Cameron plan will cut $30 billion by laying off "tens of thousands" of bureaucrats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/world/europe/25britain.html?ref=world

His mission is to make the library "a worthy successor to the Ancient Library of Alexandria. That great Library was a unique ecumenical effort of the human intellect and imagination, and remains engraved in the memories of all scientists and intellectuals to this day."

He openly embraces early Renaissance Muslims such as Ibn al-Nafis who promoted scholarly inquiry and scientific investigation -- a healthy this-worldly turn away from the supernaturalism of the Dark Ages. As the NYT puts it, "[h]is goal is to help spark the Arab world's own age of reason . . ." And he condemns Islamists and statists who, he argues, are the enemies of liberty.

Mr. Serageldin is a man of mixed philosophic premises in that he attempts to reconcile reason and faith. But it is beyond remarkable for a prominent individual, who lives where fatwas are issued like they are parking tickets, to say: "let us not be afraid of opinions and ideas."

http://www.bibalex.org/aboutus/message_en.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/world/middleeast/03egypt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=a%20voice%20in%20egypt&st=cse

. . . In Russia

A well-known museum director and a curator were both convicted "on charges of inciting religious and ethnic hatred in an exhibition called 'Forbidden Art — 2006,' which displayed works that had been banned by Russian museums."

The Platonist "prosecutors argued that the men’s activities were extremist and meant to inflame religious strife."

Supporting the censorship were "fundamentalist Russian Orthodox activists dressed in black T-shirts decorated with the Orthodox cross, skulls and crossbones and the words 'Orthodoxy or Death.'" (Anybody for a "Everybody Draw Russian Orthodox Day"?)

So much for the idea that centuries-old, abstract philosophy has nothing to do with real life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/design/13curators.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=organizers%20of%20art%20show&st=cse